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05/10/2014

You have gained the skill 'GRIT' +100xp

After a very long summer I am back at uni, it's only been the first week but it feels like I've been here for a month. I did a few things over summer mainly just sketches at parks, some sewing and a ton of baking but I did do something semi interesting; I was asked to go back to my old college and do a 3 day course and take a test so that I would have a certificate to show that I can use Autodesk Maya professionally. I managed to pass considering I hadn't used the program for a year since switching over to 3ds max but never the less I'm super proud of myself and happy that I have a new thing to put on my CV.

Sketch at Crystal Palace park

Mini Makar plushie

Chocolate Orange cake

Maya certificate

So my first week back has been stressful but exciting and I am looking forward to all the new awesome projects on the way. Our first project was a group 3D task in which we have to swap around different objects to complete them; for example I concepted a bench then modelled a hog, unwrapped a shield and textured a barrel, We then all put these assets into unreal engine 4 which is an amazing step up from UDK. We also had to learn PBR texturing which at first was confusing but it makes your objects look so beautiful in the end and is well worth learning. I will upload some pictures of that next week because we still have a few things to sort out including light-maps and learning how to render from a camera in UE4. I am also going to try and model another asset for the scene and hopefully have it finished before hand-in. Our group has worked excellent together and I have taught alot of the group the best way of modelling, unwrapping and texturing, we have also realised that for future projects it is wise to set up a Google drive straight away and have a naming convention so that it is easy to manage. I also found myself helping another student by teaching her the best way to model the bench she had been given and was struggling with; I managed to make it within 20 minutes and bang on the limit of 300 tris; this helped her immensely, I always need the extra practice anyway.

One of my mood boards for the film room project

The other project we have been set is a film room project; this is where things started to get stressful. At the beginning of the week we were set this project being told that we could choose any room we wanted from any film and that we were allowed to alter it to make it our own. So after getting into groups we made lots of mood boards looking at how we could improve potential scenes. We finally settled on the bathing quarters in spirited away, thinking that we could add in new interesting lighting, learn how to animate water and steam in UE4 and thus making a realistic interpretation. Unfortunately in our critical studies seminar we were told that everything we wanted to do we could not and that what we were told was wrong. I got fairly emotional during this seminar and had to go calm down, after coming back into the room is started to focus on what exactly the teachers wanted us to do. So I took notes and sprung back from this unfortunate situation and I am looking into lots of new films that i haven't seen but love the look of, lots of black and white films with intense contrast; I am trying my hardest on this project and I will keep on going even though I was knocked down at the start. I have gained 'GRIT' something our lectures always tell us we need to have; to be able to bounce back and carry on and that is exactly what I am going to do.